Dewey’s Moral Philosophy

John Dewey (1859–1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War,
a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and
technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed
from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an
industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It absorbed
millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching
conflicts between capital and labor as they were integrated into the
urban industrial economy. As the face-to-face communal life of small
villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms
of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and
national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms
nor traditional philosophical ethics were able to cope with the
problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional
morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound
and unreflective, it was incapable of changing to address the problems
raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought
to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic
methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral
insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to
ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and
simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical
ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most
people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral
practice needed to acquire the disposition to respond intelligently to
new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical
ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction.

Dewey’s ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end
or supreme ethical principle with the goal of identifying a method for
improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is
the use of reflective intelligence to revise our judgments in light of
the consequences of acting on them. Value judgments are tools for
satisfactorily redirecting conduct when habits fail. As tools, they
can be evaluated instrumentally. We test our value judgments by
putting them into practice and seeing whether the results are
satisfactory — whether they solve our problems with acceptable
side-effects, whether they enable successful responses to novel
problems, whether living in accordance with alternative value
judgments yields more satisfactory results. We make moral progress by
adopting habits of reflectively revising our value judgments in
response to the widest consequences for everyone of following them.
The conditions of warrant for value judgments lie in human conduct,
not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct,
such as God’s commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or
nature. Dewey offers a naturalistic metaethic of value judgments,
grounded in developmental and social psychology.

1. Developmental and Social Psychology

Dewey argues that the function of value judgments is to guide human
conduct, understood broadly to include conscious and unconscious
bodily motion, observation, reflection, imagination, judgment, and
affective responses. There are three levels of conduct: impulse,
habit, and reflective action. These differ according to how far they
are guided by ideas of what one is doing.

1.1 Impulse

Humans begin life endowed only with impulses as motor sources of
activity. Impulses include drives, appetites, instincts, and
reflexes. They are “affective-motor responses”: primitive
tendencies of movement toward some things (eyes toward human faces,
hand to grasping whatever is within reach), away from others (spitting
out bitter food, averting eyes from too bright light, brushing off
pesky flies), and even activity with no particular orientation toward
external objects (stretching, rolling over, crying,
fidgeting). Impulsive activity is not purposive. It involves no idea
of an end to be achieved by the activity. When a newborn sucks on its
mother’s nipple, it obtains food and thereby satisfies its
hunger. But it has no idea that this will be a consequence of its
sucking, and does not suck with the end in view of obtaining food (HNC
65–69).

Dewey’s choice of impulse as the original motor source of
conduct contrasts with conventional desire-based psychology in two
ways. First, it takes activity rather than rest as the default state
of human beings. Desires are defined by the states of affairs they aim
to achieve. On this model, action needs to be inspired by an idea of
some deficit. Once the deficit is repaired, the desire is fulfilled,
and the organism returns to a state of rest. Dewey observed that this
model does not fit what we know about children. They are constantly in
motion even when they achieve no particular purpose in moving. They
don’t need any end in view or perception of external lack to
move them (HNC 118–9). Second, impulse psychology stresses the
plasticity of the sources of conduct. Desires are fixed by their
ends. Impulses can be directed and shaped toward various
ends. Children’s primitive impulses to move their bodies
energetically can be directed, through education, toward the
development of socially valued skills and interpersonally coordinated
activity (HNC 69–75).

Desires or ends in view arise from the child’s experiences of
the consequences of its impulsive activity. A newborn infant cries
when it is hungry, at first with no end in view. It observes that
crying results in a feeding, which relieves its hunger. It gets the
idea that by crying, it can get relief. When crying is prompted by
this idea, the child sees it as a means to a further end, and acts for
the first time on a desire (that is, with an end in view) (TV
197–8). What desires the child acquires are shaped by
others’ responses to its original impulsive activity, by the
results that others permit such activity to achieve. Parents who
respond indiscriminately to their children’s crying end up with
spoiled children whose desires proliferate without consideration for
others’ interests. Parents who respond selectively shape both
their children’s use of means (crying) and their ends, which are
modulated in response to the resistance and claims of others. This
plasticity of ends and means is possible because the original source
of activity is impulse, not desire. Impulses demand some outlet, but
what ends they seek depends on the environment, especially
others’ responses to the child.

1.2 Habit

Habits are socially shaped dispositions to particular forms of
activity or modes of response to the environment. They channel
impulses in specified directions, toward certain outcomes, by
entrenching particular uses of means, prescribing certain conduct in
particular circumstances. While individuals may have idiosyncratic
habits, the most important habits are customs, shared habits of a
group that are passed on to children through socialization. Customs
originate in purposive activity. Every society must devise means for
the satisfaction of basic human needs for food, shelter, clothing, and
affiliation, for coping with interpersonal conflict within the group
and treatment of outsiders, for dealing with critical events such as
birth, coming of age, and death. Customary ways of satisfying needs
shape the direction of impulse in the socialized individual. A young
child just starting on solid food may be open to eating nearly
anything. But every society limits what it counts as edible. Certain
foods become freighted with social meaning —as suitable for
celebrating birthdays, good for serving to guests, reserved for
sacrifice to the gods, or fit only for animals. The child’s
hunger becomes refined into a taste for certain foods on particular
occasions. She may recoil in disgust or horror from certain edibles
deemed taboo or unclean. There may have been a rationale for the
original selection of foods. Perhaps some food was deemed taboo when
its consumption was followed by a natural disaster, and people
concluded that the gods were angry at them for consuming it. But the
habit of avoiding it may persist long after its original rationale is
forgotten (E 39–48, HNC 15–21, 43–7).

While habits incorporate purposes and socially meaningful ideas, they
operate beneath the actor’s consciousness. Once people have
learned how to achieve some purpose through habit or skill, they no
longer need to tend to what they are doing. Habits, by receding from
awareness, conserve people’s reflective resources, make their
activity fluid, and enable them to reliably produce results in stable
environments. People’s habits embody their characters (HNC
33–43, 50–2).

Because they operate subconsciously, habits may continue after their
original rationale has been forgotten or repudiated. Because they
entrench modes of conduct rather than ends in view, they may produce
unintended results when the environment changes. We can reliably
produce alternative results only by acquiring a new habit. Discovering
the means required to change habits requires psychological and
sociological inquiry, not just conscientiousness and willpower. It is
magical thinking to suppose that we can change habits through
conscious willing, when we lack knowledge of the means of change. Nor
can we check their operation through monitoring, since they operate
behind our backs. (HNC 21–32).

Habits tend to be difficult to modify because people form emotional
attachments to them, and prevailing ideologies represent current
customs as right. Dewey placed his hopes for change in the education
of youth. Because children have impulses not yet channeled into rigid
habits, they are better able to open up opportunities for change,
provided their education instills habits of independent thought,
critical inquiry, experimentation, and imagination, including sympathy
with others (DE; HNC 127–8). Such education can make habits
themselves more intelligent — flexible and responsive to
change.

1.3 Intelligent Conduct

The need to reflect intelligently on one’s conduct arises when
the usual operation of habit or impulse is blocked. Customary means
may be lacking; changed circumstances may make habits misfire,
producing disturbing consequences; the social interaction of groups of
people with different customs may produce practical conflicts that
require mutual adjustment. Blocked habits lead people to deliberate on
the problem posed by their situation. Deliberation is a thought
experiment that aims to arrive at a practical judgment, action upon
which is expected to resolve one’s predicament. Deliberation is
more intelligent, the more articulate the definition of one’s
problem in light of more observant uptake of its relevant features,
the more imaginative and feasible are proposed solutions, the more
comprehensive and accurate the estimate of the consequences of
implementing them, and the more responsive is the choice to its
expected consequences. As the individual gets more practice in
intelligent conduct, the dispositions that make it up become habits
(HWT 196–220).

2. Metaethics of Value Judgments

Dewey held that value judgments guide conduct by way of propositions
subject to empirical testing. Value judgments can be both
action-guiding and empirically warranted because they have an
instrumental form. They say that if something were done, then certain
consequences would follow, which would be valued. The point of
asserting such propositions is to intelligently guide the design and
selection of a course of action that will solve a problem, where the
assertion is part of the means by which the action is brought about
(LJP 16–17). Value judgments figure in Dewey’s psychology
in relation to the distinction between valuing and evaluation, and
Dewey’s notions of desire, taste, and interest.

2.1 Valuing vs. Evaluation

Dewey’s metaethics is grounded in the distinction between
valuing and evaluation (also denoted as “prizing”
vs. “appraising”, or “esteeming”
vs. “estimating,”). Dewey’s term
“valuation” covers both valuing and evaluation. Valuing,
prizing, and esteeming denote “affective-motor
attitudes,”, with more emphasis on “motor” than
“affective.” Valuing is a matter of loving or hating,
liking or disliking something, where these attitudes involve
tendencies to act (LJP 23–27). In his later work, Dewey embraced
a more uncompromising behavioristic view of valuing that questioned
the attribution of inner emotional aspects to valuing (TV 199,
202–3).

At the most primitive level, valuings are tendencies to move toward,
acquire, or ingest certain things, or, on the negative side, to avoid,
reject, spew out other things. One need not have any idea of what one
is valuing in order to value it. Hence, they are less sophisticated
than desires, which have propositional content (an end in view) and
arise from practical reflection (TV 207). In the first instance,
valuings denote impulses toward or away from objects, as when an
infant turns toward human voices, or swats away a fly. Valuings of
objects as useful can also be immediate — that is, not mediated
by cognition or awareness of what one is doing. One uses a fork to
pick up food, without thinking about it. Habits, then, are also a
species of valuing.

Dewey contrasted valuings, which are mostly behavioral, from the
philosophical idea of a pleasure or enjoyment, understood as an
isolated and passive experience. Dewey criticized that idea as arising
from philosophical demands not grounded in experience (LJP
40–1). In reality, when we enjoy something, as when we savor an
ice cream cone, we are actively engaged with it: we roll the ice cream
around on our tongues, chew the cone, taking note of its texture and
flavor, explore it on all sides. These activities, not just passive
experiences, are part of the pleasure of eating an ice cream cone.

Valuings may be expressed in ejaculations. A child may jump up and
down, saying “ goody! ” at an ice cream cone. As a
spontaneous and uncalculated ejaculation, “ goody ” does
not express a value judgment. The child may say the same thing with
self-awareness, as if to say “I like ice cream.” Such a
subjective report of a valuing still does not express a value
judgment.

Thus, value judgments are practical judgments. Although they may have
a descriptive form (“x is good,”
“x is right”), the constitutive point of making
them is to alter or guide our valuings. The need to question our
valuings arises when immediate action on them is not possible or
yields unsatisfactory consequences. There is no more ice cream in the
refrigerator; is it worthwhile to go to the store to buy some more?
Or, the lactose-intolerant person may observe that she gets a stomach
ache after eating ice cream, and discover that ice cream is the
cause. Should she just give up ice cream, can she take something that
avoids the symptoms, or are there lactose-free substitutes? Having
sketched out some alternative solutions to her predicament, she
imaginatively fills out the details of acting on them, including their
projected consequences (Do the pills have side effects? Does the
lactose-free ice cream taste good?). The consequences are the objects
of valuings, which guide the formation of a new end-in-view, a new
valuing — say, to go for lactose-free ice cream, because taking
pills would be bothersome, and the lactose-free ice cream tastes just
as good. The comparative value judgment (“eating lactose-free
ice cream is better than taking pills with regular ice cream, or
eating regular ice cream alone”) is practical because its
function is to guide conduct toward the best solution to the
person’s problem.

Thus, value judgments or appraisals result in new valuings. This fact
has two implications, one for the nature of valuing, the other for the
assessment of value judgments. First, when valuings change in response
to value judgments, they become desires, interests, or tastes. Second,
because the function of value judgments is to constitute new valuings
that solve the individual’s predicament, they can be assessed
instrumentally, in terms of how well they perform that function.

2.2 Desires, Interests, and Tastes.

In the ice cream case just described, the lactose-intolerant person
was initially consuming ice cream out of impulse or habit, without
thinking about it. Her conduct was caused by unreflective
valuings. (In reality, Dewey stressed, hardly any of the valuings of
adults are wholly primitive, as the valuings of infants are. So the
illustration is only of a relatively unreflective valuing, one that
incorporates a relatively low level of understanding of the
consequences of acting on it.) When she became aware of the fact that
her consumption of ice cream was causing a problem, she investigated
the problem, articulating its contours, with the aim of solving it, of
finding some alternative that would “work,” in the sense
of enabling the satisfactory resumption of
activity. “Working” need not mean finding an alternative
means to resuming the same valued activity. Her activity has changed:
now she aims to consume lactose-free ice cream. Her valuation
activity has changed both in the object toward which it is directed,
and in its cognitive character: it embodies an articulate
understanding of what she is going after, which reflects her
appraisals of its merits.

The result of such appraisal is the adoption of an end-in-view, the
institution of a desire. Dewey’s term
“desire” is closer to our “intention” or
“purpose” or even “plan” (TV 238) in denoting
a tendency toward action that the agent has adopted, rather than
simply a motive clamoring for our attention or moving us behind our
backs. Desire denotes a reflective, conscious valuing, not a mere
“affective-motor” attitude, but an
“affective-ideational-motor activity,” a
“union of prizing and appraising” (TV 218). It is a
cognitive state. As the individual engages this new valuation, she
experiences the consequences of acting on it. Reflection upon these
consequences is then incorporated into more intelligent valuations, by
way of further appraisals. The result of criticism is the refinement
of taste — that is, a “rational liking” (VEK 15), a
“liking for a reason” (VORC 95). The novice and the
connoisseur may both value (like) the same object. But the latter has
a reflective and articulate grasp of the features of the object that
are liked, plus enough experience with valuations of objects of that
type to have warranted confidence that these features merit
liking. That is, the connoisseur has enough experience to warrant
confidence that there are not further features of the object or
consequences of valuing it which, once appreciated, would reverse or
detract from the liking. Desires (ends-in-view) do not exist in
isolation from each other. We reflect on the consequences of
attempting to jointly satisfy our desires. Appraisals of such
consequences serve to modify desires so that they are coordinated with
one another. Dewey called such systematically coordinated desires
“interests” (TV 207).

2.3 Value Judgments as Instruments

Dewey characterized value judgments as instrumental in three senses
that he did not explicitly distinguish. The first we may call the
constitutive function of value judgments. The point of appraisal, of
making a value judgment, is to bring about the resumption of unified
activity, when the normal course of activity has been interrupted by a
problematic situation (TV 221–2). This situation incites
hesitation and doubt about what to do. Dewey’s point is that
value judgments are essentially practical judgments. They aim to guide
action, not just to passively describe things as they are. Making the
judgment is the necessary means to deciding on a new course of action
that will solve the problem (LJP 14–16).

Second, the content of value judgments is about the value of actions
and objects as means — that is, their value in relation
to their consequences, or the consequences of valuing them in the
situation at hand. Value judgments have the form: if one acted in a
particular way (or valued this object), then certain consequences
would ensue, which would be valued (VEK 11). The difference between an
apparent and a real good, between an unreflectively and a reflectively
valued good, is captured by its value not just as immediately
experienced in isolation, but in view of its wider consequences and
how they are valued. The ice cream seems good to the
lactose-intolerant person; it is immediately prized by her. But it is
judged to be not really good in view of the intolerable consequence of
consuming it. Value judgments place things in their wider context and
judge them in relation to their consequences, more fully considered
(TV 209–213).

Third, while the proximate and constitutive end of a value judgment is
the resumption of activity that has been interrupted by a problematic
situation, judgment has a remoter end, of using the action decided
upon as a means for uncovering new evidence about what to value.
Intelligently made value judgments are held provisionally and
hypothetically, with an eye toward revising them if the consequences
of acting on them are not found valuable. So viewed, value judgments
are tools for discovering how to live a better life, just as
scientific hypotheses are tools for uncovering new information about
the world (VEK 19–26; VORC 88–9).

2.4 Experimental Confirmation of Value Judgments

Dewey’s pragmatist moral epistemology follows from his
instrumental account of value judgments. It is uncontroversial that
instrumental judgments are subject to empirical testing and
confirmation, since they involve empirical claims about causation. We
test scientific hypotheses by bringing about their antecedents and
seeing if the results are as they predicted. Similarly, we test value
judgments by acting on them and seeing if we value the consequences in
the way the judgment predicted. Acting on our value judgments —
putting them into practice — supplies the data for confirming or
disconfirming them. Roughly speaking, a value judgment hypothesizes
“try it, you’ll like it” — a statement easily
subject to empirical verification and refutation. Intelligent value
judgments proceed not by random trial-and-error, but from skilled
projection of prior confirmed “try-like” regularities to
analogous novel situations, which are continuously modified in light
of experiences of the wider consequences of trying in these new
situations.

Dewey derived several unsettling implications for traditional morality
and traditional philosophical ethics from his moral epistemology.
Traditional or conventional morality tries to enforce unquestioning
obedience to its precepts. Dewey argued that this was a formula for
perpetual immaturity, because it cut off all possibility of learning
better ways to live by experimenting with them. Pragmatist moral
epistemology also rejects philosophy’s a priori,
dialectical methods for determining the good and the right. One cannot
prove that something is valuable by mere argument. Arguments, at
best, make certain value judgments plausible as hypotheses — and
even then, only if grounded in experience and reflection on the wider
consequences of acting on them. Ultimately, the hypotheses must be
tested, by seeing how one values the actual results of putting them
into practice. It follows that the dogmatism of traditional
philosophical ethics is folly. It hobbles progress in life. Even the
best confirmed value judgments can hold only
provisionally. Circumstances change, thereby modifying the
consequences of acting on particular evaluations. Change requires us
to revisit our original appraisals with an eye toward modifying them
in light of these new consequences (RP). Moreover, we don’t know
the consequences of trials not performed. It is therefore always
possible that we are missing out on better modes of conduct that we
haven’t tested, or even imagined (VEK 25–6).

2.5 Contextualism

Dewey’s moral epistemology is contextualist. The form of a
contextual standard of value is: it solves the problem encountered in
this situation (better than other imagined or tested solutions). A
person may articulate the problematic features of her situation in
various ways: as obstacles, confusions, conflicts, unmet needs,
dangers, and so on. The test of a value judgment — whether it
“works” — is whether it successfully identifies an
action that overcomes the obstacles, clears up the confusions,
resolves the conflicts, satisfies the needs, avoids or eliminates the
dangers, and so on. The standard of success for value judgments is
thus developed internally to the practices at hand, relative to
people’s descriptions of their problems (HNC 199, 208; RP
173–4). Of course, hypothesized solutions may fail in
practice. This may lead agents to revise their understandings of their
problems, rather than just trying alternative solutions to the same
problems. For example, the failure of a course of therapy may lead a
doctor to reconsider the original diagnosis. The problematic features
of situations are not given. Identification of the problem begins in
often inchoate experiences of doubt, confusion, apprehension,
frustration, distress, anger, conflict, and so forth, which call for
articulate diagnosis. Such diagnoses or descriptions of problems are
open to further refinement and even radical revision in light of
experimental testing in tandem with proposed solutions.

In upholding contextualism, Dewey rejected the idea that standards of
correctness for valuing could be devised external to practice. He
rejected any conception of intrinsic value as some kind of existence
or property that has value in itself, regardless of context, which is
the object of practice to bring about, realize, or conform to.
Asserting the existence of such values tears the practice of making
value judgments out of the contexts that give them meaning and point.
This does not mean that one cannot make meaningful general value
judgments. Some problems and solutions are of a generalized sort,
encountered in many situations that vary widely in their details.
Abstract, general value judgments may therefore be useful in a wide
range of situations. But this does not mean that they point to values
that exist outside of practice (TV 230).

3. Means and Ends

The standard objection to Dewey’s instrumental theory of value
judgments is that it concerns the value of things as means only, and
not as ends. It fails to fix on what is ultimately important:
intrinsic values or final ends. Some ultimate end outside of practice
must be postulated as given, as the standard against which the value
of acts as means can be judged, lest we fall into an infinite
regress. We either need some conception of a summum bonum,
justified apart from practical reasoning, toward which acts must aim,
or Dewey’s theory reduces to a form of Humean instrumentalism,
in which ends are given by our desires or immediate likings, and the
only question is how to satisfy them.

Dewey’s reply to this objection goes to the heart of his moral
philosophy. He argued that the character and value of means and ends
was reciprocally determined. We do not first already have an end in
view, with the only question how to achieve it. We lack a complete
conception of our end until we have a complete grasp of the course of
action that will take us there. Moreover, a judgment of the value of
ends apart from the means needed to get there, and apart from the
value of ends as means — as things that have consequences of
their own — cannot provide the basis for rational action. Acting
on such radically truncated judgments would be crazy. Our judgments of
the worth of an end are inextricably tied up with our judgments of the
costs of achieving it, both in terms of the means needed to get there
and the unintended consequences of getting there. Practical judgment
is creative: it institutes new ends-in-view. It is transformative:
appraisals affect our immediate valuings of things.

3.1 Reciprocal Determination of Means and Ends

The occasion for making value judgments is a problematic
situation, in which one’s activity is blocked and one does not
know what to do. At first, the problem is experienced as uneasiness
and hesitation. Reflection is needed to articulate what experience
signals as a problem. A complete description of the problem to be
solved is simultaneously the articulation of a complete solution, a
unified course of action identifying a series of steps (means)
resulting in an end, which the judger predicts will be found
valuable as a complete package. A person is walking to a lake but
stops upon reaching a deep ditch. She entertains possible courses of
action, which are simultaneously preliminary descriptions of problems
and solutions. (“I need to jump across”; “I need to
build a bridge”). These incomplete descriptions prompt the
gathering of new data to articulate them further (“Can I jump
that far?” “Is there a log around?”). A complete
investigation yields a joint description of the problem and its
solution (“I need to drag this log across here, the narrowest
part of the ditch, and walk across.”) (HWT 200–6).

The value of the end depends on the costs and benefits of the means,
and the costs and benefits of the further consequences to which the
end is judged as a means or cause. In the preceding example, it might
appear that a certain final end — getting to the lake — is
governing deliberation. But this is so only provisionally. A full
inquiry into the means needed to achieve the end may lead to a
re-evaluation of the end itself. (“The only log able to bridge
the ditch is narrow at the end; I have bad balance; I would be
seriously injured if I fell off the log. Getting to the lake
isn’t so attractive after all ….”). Furthermore,
reaching the end has anticipated consequences of its own (“That
bear on the other side of the ditch looks hungry….”) that
may modify the valuation of the end (“It’s better if I
stay on this side.”). It is irrational to take one’s end
as fixed before investigating the costs of the means and the
consequences of achieving the end (TV 214). Thus, the standard model
of instrumental reasoning, which takes ends as fixed and inquires
solely into the means needed to satisfy them, is inadequate. The point
of inquiring into means, and into ends considered as means or causes
of further consequences, is not merely to determine how to achieve an
end, but to appraise the value of the end itself (TV 210–19; VEK
4–7).

3.2 Practical Judgment is Creative

The preceding considerations show that practical judgment is creative:
it institutes new ends-in-view, new desires. Against Dewey’s
claim of creativity, it might be objected that Dewey’s theory of
practical reasoning still presupposes certain values. In the ditch
case, the original end would not have been rejected but for the
agent’s fear of injury. Dewey agrees that “judgment at
some point runs against the brute act of holding something dear as its
limit” (LJP 46). Without some prizings that are not themselves
subject to appraisal at the time of deliberation, there is nothing to
guide practical reasoning. Yet these very prizings may be subject to
appraisal at some other time, perhaps even as a consequence of acting
on them on this occasion.

One might still object that this is not enough to show that practical
judgment is genuinely creative. Perhaps it just takes given prizings
and determines the end through some kind of vector addition, taking
their weights as given. If a man is out to buy a suit, for instance,
he approaches the problem with a given set of habitual priorities
— for example, that durability and cheapness are more important
than style. The man’s choice of suit thus merely reflects the
weights of the man’s already given priorities. But if this were
all there was to choice, then deliberation would hardly be
necessary. He would simply inspect the prized qualities of the
available suits, and let impulse determine his choice from there. In
fact, Dewey argued, deliberation
assigns weights to different prized qualities in the context of
choice, rather than taking them as given. We can’t really tell how
much weight to put on this or that prized quality until we see it
instantiated in combination with the other qualities in the set of
alternatives, and consider further how the suit with its qualities
will function as a means in the future. Although the man may be used
to prizing durability in a cheap suit, and placing little weight on
style, this suit is to be used for job interviews, which are expected
to land him a much higher paying job. This use of the suit gives him
several reasons to alter the habitual weights he assigns to suit
qualities. Anticipating that he will soon come to prize style more,
once he is able to afford it, he may decide to borrow against the
future and go for the expensive stylish suit now, so that he will
still prize it after he lands the job. Or he may decide that he needs
to make an especially good impression in order to land the job, so
that he must weight style more heavily than cheapness now. Or he may
decide that he’ll only need to use this suit once, to get a job, and
after that his tastes will change commensurately with his income, but
in ways he can’t know ahead of time. Hence, he should not count
durability as an important value here. Evaluation remains creative
even granting that it presupposes certain prizings, because it is
still up to us to assign weights to prized qualities in light of the
novel features of the context. Prior weightings cannot determine
current ones, since the former may be maladapted to the new situation
(LJP 30–5; VEK 10–20).

3.3 Practical Judgment is Transformative

Practical reasoning does not merely generate new appraisals; it
transforms our prizings. This is the point of Dewey’s theory of
criticism and taste. Judgments of the merits of prizings feed back
onto our primitive prizings and transform them. They not only make
these prizings more articulate (a union of prizing and appraising); in
making us more vividly aware of the features of the object that we
prize, they alter the directions of our prizings (VEK 4–9). As
a result of deliberation, the man who needs the suit comes to prize
style, say, more than he did before, and cheapness less. Nor is this
possibility of transformation limited to what are conventionally
understood to be “instrumental” values. Whether a quality
such as style is “intrinsic” or “instrumental”
is not built into the nature of the quality itself, but a function of
how it is regarded by the individual at the time. Instruments may be
prized in themselves (as when we admire a particularly finely balanced
tool). More importantly, stylishness may immediately attract —
be immediately prized — but it also has its uses in impressing
some prospective employers, and its unintended consequence of turning
off others (who may think it important in an employee not to show
off).

3.4 Practical Judgment and Character

Against Dewey’s instrumental theory of value judgments, one
might object that sometimes we appraise valuings as intrinsically good
or bad. We might judge that prizing another’s suffering is
despicable, apart from its consequences. Dewey rejected the sharp
distinction between character and action, motive and consequence, that
this picture presupposes. A character trait is a tendency to pursue
certain ends, and so must be appraised in terms of its typical
(intended) results. Thus, we condemn schadenfreude primarily because
it leads to cruelty. At the same time, conduct has among its
consequences a tendency to reinforce the character traits that caused
them, or to consolidate into a character trait its direction of
impulse. Conduct constitutes the moral self. So, we properly condemn a
single manifestation of schadenfreude — say, laughing at
suffering caused by a natural disaster — even if it, in itself,
did nothing to increase anyone’s suffering. This is the truth
that moralities of intention grasp, which narrowly consequentialist
theories do not (E 173–5, 286–9).

One who holds that evil attitudes can be bad in themselves, apart from
their consequences, would want to say more than this. Dewey can say
more, too. He would agree that we do not value attitudes only
instrumentally. We immediately prize some attitudes and despise
others, in the sense that we directly prize and despise them without
first appraising them instrumentally. A sympathetic person immediately
hates expressions of schadenfreude without first checking whether they
actually caused anyone to suffer. Such valuings can themselves be
subject to appraisal. If we endorse them upon reflection on their
consequences, we judge that they are merited (see
the section on Virtue Theories below).
Among the most important consequences of such
second-order valuings are their impact on our characters: they tend to
reinforce the attitudes that are prized, and make us recoil from the
attitudes that are despised, leading us to seek means to change those
attitudes. Dewey denies that there is any sensible way to appraise
character traits apart from their typical consequences. So there is no
getting away from consequences altogether. However, his theory has the
resources to (a) condemn particular manifestations of bad attitudes,
even when they do not have their typically bad direct consequences,
(b) immediately (“intrinsically”) despise them, (c) judge
that such immediate condemnations are warranted, and thereby (d)
constitute new, reflective and cognitively loaded
affective-ideational-motor attitudes of condemnation. His theory can
make parallel claims for prizings and appraisals of good
attitudes.

Thus, we begin with immediate valuings or prizings of things. Such
prizings have no cognitive content. When we ask whether something
ought to be valued, we enter the domain of appraisal or value
judgments. To appraise something is to judge it in relation to the
means required to attain it, and as a means or cause of further
consequences. Appraisal, then, is fundamentally about means. However,
such appraisals transform our original prizings. If we discover that
the cost of attaining something prized is too high, we prize it less
(reduce or eliminate our tendency to go after it). If we discover that
attaining it has further, disvalued, consequences, we also prize it
less. If attaining it has further, prized consequences, or if the
means to attain it are themselves prized, we value it even more. Now
the valuing has cognitive content, and is articulately directed to
that content. Now we value or disvalue something under a description
(the ice cream as cause of stomach ailment, the suit as stylish and
impressive to prospective employers, the schadenfreude as despicable).
The appraisal of things as means feeds back into our prizing of things
as ends.

4. Moral Theories: the Good, the Right, the Virtuous

Traditional normative moral theories generally fall into three
types. Teleological theories seek to identify some supreme end or best
way of life, and reduce the right and the virtuous to the promotion of
this good. Deontological theories seek to identify a supreme principle
or laws of morality independent of the good, and subordinate the
pursuit of the good to conformity with the moral law. Virtue theories
take phenomena of approval and disapproval to be fundamental, and
derive the right and the good from them. Dewey declined to offer
substantive answers to the traditional questions posed by these
theories, arguing that no fixed ends or moral rules could be adequate
in a world of constant change and plural and conflicting values. In
place of fixed goals and rules of action, Dewey offered his method of
experimental inquiry, which he argued was shared between theoretical
and practical reason (RP 174). He drew insight from traditional moral
theories by recasting their substantive answers to traditional moral
questions in methodological terms.

Dewey also rejected the reductionist tendencies of these theories,
arguing that each drew from an independent source of evidence about
what one ought to do. Teleological theories draw from the efforts of
the individual agent to distinguish the real from the apparent good,
and to harmonize conflicting impulses by subsuming them under a
comprehensive conception of the good. Deontological theories draw from
the efforts of groups of people to harmonize and adjudicate the
conflicting claims they make on one another by means of impartial
laws. Virtue theories draw from the praise and blame people accord to
each others’ conduct. Resisting the tendency of philosophical
ethics to represent the grounds of these theories in metaphysical
terms, Dewey insisted that the sources of evidence for these three
types of theory were empirical. Teleological theories are based on the
reflective desires of the individual; deontological theories on the
socially authorized demands of interested others; virtue theories on
the spontaneous tendencies of observers to approve and disapprove of
people’s conduct. These sources of evidence for different sorts
of moral claims are independent from the others. None carries
automatic or conclusive authority. Hence, the tension among the three
types of moral consideration is permanent and cannot be resolved by
reducing one to another or insisting that one automatically overrides
the others (TIF). Resolution of conflicts among these considerations
depends on the context in which they arise.

4.1 Theories of the Good (Teleological Theories)

We have already seen that Dewey casts the distinction between the
apparent and the real good in terms of what is valued immediately in
impulse and unreflective habit, and what is valued reflectively as an
object of intelligent desire. Dewey insisted on the primacy of the
reflective method of inquiry over settling on fixed answers to
questions about the good. This can be seen in his critiques and
methodological reinterpretations of the three types of theory of
goodness dominant today: hedonism, ideal (objective list) theories,
and informed desire theory.

Hedonism supposes that the value of acts can be reduced to the
quantity of pleasure and pain they produce. Estimating such values
requires that we be able to break down the pleasures and pains of
different activities and experiences into simple identical units, and
then sum them up again. This theoretical demand outruns the holistic
and complex character of our experiences of pleasure and pain (LJP
40–1). Pleasures and pains in reflective individuals are
inextricably bound up with what Dewey called “ideational”
factors — that is, with articulate conceptions of what they are
taking pleasure in. They are therefore not pure sensory units but
already contain elements of judgment or appraisal. Critical among
these are considerations of the consequences of prizing certain things
for one’s own moral character. Since we form our character by
cultivating habits of valuing some things over others, and we prize
and appraise character itself, we cannot simply take current pleasures
as given (E 193–4; LJP 41–2). Good and bad people take
pleasure in different things. Such facts can give us reason to
cultivate different tastes from those we currently have.

Although hedonism fails as a theory that gives us a fixed end, it does
contain a methodological insight. Nothing is good that cannot be
desired. All desire contains an element of enjoyment or liking. Hence,
pleasure can be seen as a sign of the good, as evidence of what is
valuable. Nevertheless, what makes desire a sound guide to the good is
the fact that it incorporates foresight and reflection on the wider
consequences of acting on it, not just that it incorporates a liking
of its object (E 195–6).

Ideal or objective list theories attempt to harmonize conflicting
desires not, as hedonism does, by reducing them all to a common
denominator, but by systematically fitting them together into an ideal
or plan of life. Dewey argued that people construct ideals that make
sense in view of their particular social circumstances. For example,
ideals of material or political advancement make sense of the
strivings of business people and politicians. Such ideals have, at
best, only contextual validity and cannot be prescribed as fixed ends
for all people. There can no more be a single best way of life than
there can be an ideal house for all times and places. To suppose that
there is forecloses the possibility of imagination inventing something
even better. Yet, ideals serve a highly important function for
individuals, if they are considered as hypotheses about how one should
live that one can test in experiences of living in accordance with
them. So understood, ideals are tools for discovering evidence about
the good (LE 59–68, 229–30; E 185, 189–91,
202–210).

Informed desire theories of the good, which define the good in terms
of what an individual would desire if fully informed, come closest to
Dewey’s own account. Dewey spoke of the good as the object of
desires of which we approve in calm, informed reflection (E 208,
212). Yet Dewey’s aims differ from that of most of today’s
informed desire theorists. The latter tend to accept as fixed the
character of the individual whose good is being judged, and alter only
the individual’s cognitive capacities and beliefs so as to read
off the good for the individual from what his cognitively enhanced
self wants. This commits the same error that Dewey charged against
hedonism, of omitting critical appraisal of one’s own character
as an important factor in determining what one ought to desire. In
identifying the good with the objects of approved desires, Dewey
highlighted the importance of character to identifying the
good. Before we can endorse a desire, we need to ask whether we, or an
impartial observer, could approve of someone who had it (E
239–47). The good is what good people — those possessing
foresight and wide sympathies — desire. Dewey also resisted the
conversion of a method of inquiry into a fixed criterion of
value. There is never an end to inquiry — no such thing as
complete information — because circumstances are always changing
and imagination constructs new possibilities for living (E 213). Nor
does the projection of desires we would have if we reached an end to
inquiry offer a recognizable vision of human life. Fully informed
people do not desire more information. But education, inquiry, and
individual development in light of new discoveries are constitutive
goods of human life. The desire to skip to the end to see what is
ultimately valuable is a desire to skip human life, as if the process
of learning through living were merely a means and not prized in
itself (HNC 194–202). What, in light of inquiry, we reflectively
desire, and approve of desiring, is evidence of what is good. But it
is always defeasible in light of further inquiry.

4.2 Theories of Right (Deontological Theories)

Pragmatism in ethics is often regarded as a form of teleology or
consequentialism. Yet Dewey rejected accounts of the right that
defined it in terms of promoting the good (E 214–216). The
concept of the right contains an element not contained in the good
— namely, that of an authoritative demand. The phenomenology of
claims of good and right are also distinct: the good attracts or
appeals, whereas claims of right appear to command authority. The
demands of the right often conflict with individual desire, since they
arise from the conflicting, socially authorized claims of other
people. The right arises from the need to harmonize the claims of
people with distinct interests and conceptions of the good by means of
reasonable principles that all can accept. Thus, although claims of
right are grounded in people’s interests in gaining the
assistance and cooperation of others, and in protection against
others’ encroachments, the right cannot be defined in terms of
promoting the good of any individual. Nor can it be defined in terms
of promoting some independent conception of the good of society as a
whole, since any such conception must already persuade the individual
that it accords a reasonable place for her own claims, and thus
already incorporate a notion of right (E 215–7; TIF
284–5).

The deontological thought that the right is independent of the good
reflects the reality that the claims of others, even when reasonable
and authoritative, do not automatically harmonize with the desires of
the individual upon whom the claims are made. However, Dewey rejected
the further deontological claim that there is a sharp distinction
between the moral and nonmoral good, where the former is identified
with conformity to the right, and the latter with satisfying
individual desires. After all, claims of right are designed to protect
and advance the interests of individuals that are considered important
enough to warrant social support. Moreover, they are constitutive
features of social relationships that people find good. The authority
of these claims draws on the appeal of these relationships and on the
motives of love, respect, and loyalty cultivated within them (E
218–219).

Deontological theories tend to identify the right either with fixed
laws or rules of conduct, such as the Ten Commandments, or with a
single supreme principle of morality, such as the Categorical
Imperative, understood as supplying a decision procedure in
ethics. The attempt to specify substantive rules of right conduct for
all cases founders on the need to make exceptions for different
circumstances. “Thou shalt not kill” cannot be taken at
face value, given the justifiability of killing in self-defense. Yet
it is impossible to specify in advance all of the circumstances that
could justify killing even in self-defense, given the complications
that arise in, say, defensive warfare (e.g., problems of collateral
damage). As social conditions change — for example, the
technology and tactics of warfare, and our ability to affect the
interests of distant others — rules of conduct that had been
accepted in the past must be subject to revision, lest learning cease
and people remain mired in dysfunctional habits (E 275–9). A
method of moral inquiry is needed that can revise given rules, laws,
and habits in light of new problems and circumstances. This method
would take current and past customs and laws as starting points for
moral theory, in conjunction with the history and anthropology of
custom, the history of systematic theoretical reflection on morality,
and the social sciences, which inform us of the nature of current
problems, and the probable consequences of attempting to institute
this or that new law or custom (E 178–9). Intelligent moral
inquiry, while it begins with current customs and convictions about
the right, treats them as hypotheses to be tested in experience.

The attempt to identify a decision procedure for the right independent
of considerations of the consequences of following certain principles
is also bound to fail. Dewey endorsed the “empty
formalism” critique of Kant’s Categorical Imperative,
insofar as it aspires to reach moral conclusions without presupposing
anything to be good. Yet, reinterpreted as tools of moral inquiry, as
standpoints from which to identify and analyze morally relevant
considerations, principles such as the Golden Rule and the Categorical
imperative offer sound advice: they are designed to ensure that the
interests of all have been fairly considered in formulating concrete
principles of conduct proposed as general laws or customs to be
generally enforced (E 223–5, 280–3).

4.3 Virtue Theories

Virtue theories take approval and disapproval, praise and blame, as
the fundamental bases for morality. Customary morality relies heavily
on acts of praise and blame to perpetuate itself. Critical reflection
seeks a standard by which people’s approvals and disapprovals
can be appraised. Dewey argued that the British utilitarians carried
this inquiry most deeply with their ideal observer theory of morality,
which identified the standard with that by which an informed impartial
and benevolent observer appraises conduct — namely, its tendency
to promote everyone’s welfare. But, given that the content of
people’s welfare is not fixed, but open to imaginative
expansion, this standard can no more be applied in algorithmic fashion
than moral principles can be. Like moral principles, the utilitarian
standard of approval sets up a general standpoint for the appraisal of
conduct, and revision of ends in light of such appraisal, rather than
a fixed criterion that can be mechanically applied (E
237–47).

Dewey argued that praise and blame function to make individuals
conscious of and responsive to the wider consequences of their actions
for others. This forward-looking view of praise and blame enabled
Dewey to avoid the problem of free will in its connection with
responsibility. Praise and blame are tools for enabling
people to assume responsibility for their conduct — to enable
them to regulate their conduct in view of their consequences for
others. Hence, the presupposition of praise and blame is not that the
individual held to account could have done otherwise at the time of
acting. It is rather that praise and blame can induce people to be
more conscientious — to govern their conduct in light of the
responsibilities ascribed to them, to act out of a sense of their own
responsibility, and thereby to take notice and mastery of the motives
by which they act — in the future. This fact is most evident in
our practices of praising and blaming children. Young children are not
autonomous agents and lack free will in any sense relevant to the
debates about responsibility. They are not responsible for their
conduct. Yet, in praising and blaming them, we hold them responsible
for their conduct, as the necessary means by which they can become
responsible for their conduct in the future. This is not a special or
anomalous use of praise or blame; it is its paradigmatic use (HNC
119–22; LE 86–96).

4.4 Reflective Morality

Dewey’s accounts of the main types of moral theory fit neatly
into his experimentalist account of practical reasoning and value
judgments. Individuals begin their lives as human societies did
historically: acting on impulse and custom. These modes of conduct,
being unselfconscious and shortsighted, cannot handle all the
challenges life poses, and generate problems of their own. Thus arises
the need for reflective appraisal of conduct in view of its wider
consequences, with the aim of controlling future conduct by means of
these appraisals, so as to solve the problems at hand. This practical
reasoning uses the same general experimental method as theoretical
reasoning does. We begin with certain given facts: these are our
immediate valuings of things by impulse and habit. The data for
appraisal of these valuings come from the consequences of acting on
them, along with the ways we value these consequences. The three types
of moral theory identify three sources of evidence that bear on our
current valuings: our desires (which by definition are informed), the
claims or demands of other people, and their approvals and
disapprovals of our conduct. Traditional philosophical ethics tries to
erect these sources of evidence into transcendent, authoritative
criteria, typically by means of certain idealizing moves (such as
universalization and full information). Dewey argued that the
supposedly external, transcendent criteria for appraising conduct
— ideals of the good, principles of right, standards of approval
and disapproval — should rather be treated as hypotheses, as
tools for uncovering additional data needed to appraise our
valuings. They provide us with standpoints by which we can make
ourselves aware of a wider set of consequences of our conduct. Ideals
of the good enable us to take up the standpoint of the prudent and
foresighted individual, concerned to harmonize current desires with
one another and with the self’s future needs and
interests. Principles of right enable us to take up the standpoint of
others who make claims on us in light of the impact of our conduct on
their interests. Standards of approval enable us to take up the
standpoint of observers, who approve and disapprove of our conduct not
just for its consequences but on account of its underlying motives as
well. Thus, these norms enable us to survey the consequences of our
conduct from a first personal, second personal, and third personal
point of view, respectively, and to shape new ends (desires)
accordingly. But no actual ideal, principle, or standard exhaustively
captures each point of view, since each is subject to further
development with further extensions of information, imagination, and
sympathy. They can only be accepted tentatively, as hypotheses to be
tested by acting on them and seeing what further data they
elicit. Some of this data — new regrets, new complaints, new
disapprovals — will disconfirm our hypotheses and provide
grounds for revising our ideals, principles, and standards. (This is
not to suggest that the import of the data themselves should be taken
at face value. Some regrets simply reflect the resistance of old
dysfunctional habits; some complaints are unreasonable; some
disapprovals reflect hidebound and dogmatic dispositions. But these
hypotheses, too, can be tested.) History and the social sciences
provide us with additional data on the customs and laws by which
people have dealt with the problems that have arisen in their
circumstances, and general knowledge of human psychology and social
interactions that enable us to learn from the experiences of others
and formulate educated guesses — new hypotheses — for how
we might solve our problems.

Dewey stressed several themes in developing his account of reflective
morality for the present day: change, pluralism, conflict, and
anti-authoritarianism. Living in an era of unprecedented social
change, Dewey situated reflective morality in a non-teleological
Darwinian view of organisms’ adaptation to environmental
contingencies (IDP). Nature does not supply a telos or rule for human
beings, but rather a constantly changing environment to which humans
need to adjust by using their intelligence. Modern science and
education lead people to doubt old traditions and arrive at different
beliefs by empowering them to think for themselves. Immigration brings
people of different faiths and cultures together, with a need to
devise shared moral norms to regulate their
interactions. Interpersonal conflict along lines of class, religion,
race, and other socially salient divisions generates demands for new
norms to resolve disputes. All of these factors undermine appeals to
traditional norms, which are not adapted to changed circumstances,
presuppose a consensus that does not exist, and suppress rather than
address interpersonal conflict. Nor is resort to traditional
authorities any solution. People don’t agree on their
authority. Moreover, authority itself corrupts people’s moral
views:

It is difficult for a person in a place of authoritative power
to avoid supposing that what he wants is right as long as he has power
to enforce his demand. And even with the best will in the world, he is
likely to be isolated from the real needs of others, and the perils of
ignorance are added to those of selfishness. (E 226)

Moral insights come from the demands of others, not from any
individual’s isolated reflections. And insights come from all
social quarters. Intelligent revision of norms therefore requires
practices of moral inquiry that stress mutual responsiveness to
others’ claims, and social inclusion of all members of
society. Such practices are constitutive features of democracy,
understood as a form of everyday life (not simply as a type of state
constitution) (CD 224–230). This is the point at which
Dewey’s political philosophy emerges from his ethics.
Democracy, in Dewey’s view, is the means by which we practice
intelligent moral inquiry together, seeking solutions to the problems
we face together (PP).

5. Aesthetic Value

Dewey’s identification of intelligent reflection with
experimental methods might be thought to suggest a narrowly
scientistic worldview, in which values are reduced to purely
subjective, arational “oughts” or likings applied to
inherently value-free facts or natural kinds discovered and defined
independently of human valuations. In fact, Dewey’s project
aims to unify scientific with humanistic inquiry rather than to
enforce divisions between the two. While intelligent humanistic
inquiry partakes of experimental method, scientific inquiry itself is
an art (EN 285–6). The categories in terms of which we make
intelligent sense of the world are not limited to those which are
useful solely for describing objects of abstract, generalized
knowledge divorced from feelings and aspirations. Feelings and
aspirations are themselves part of the natural world and hence proper
subjects of experimental investigation (EN 316). The job of art is to
create objects that enhance our capacities for meaningful,
appreciative experience. Criticism in turn aims to develop meaningful
categories that inform enriched experiences of objects.
“Nothing but the best, the richest and fullest experience
possible, is good enough for man” (EN 308).

For experiences to be capable of such enrichment, they must be able to
incorporate intelligent appraisals, just as desires and actions do.
To the extent that such incorporation is attentive to the features of
the object along with their import, so as to produce a unified, free,
emotionally engaged, satisfying, appreciative experience of the
object, the experience realizes aesthetic value (AE 42–3, 47).
Such appreciative perception of the object incorporates knowledge of
causes and effects. “[T]here enter[s] into the
[epicure’s] taste, as directly experienced, qualities that
depend upon reference to its source and its manner of production in
connection with criteria of excellence” (AE 55). The listener
informed by music theory learns to hear, and thereby take pleasure in,
different types of modulation from one key to another, and is thereby
primed for certain musical expectations, creating alternating
tensions, fulfillments, and surprises as the musical performance
unfolds. Similar claims can be made for all of the arts, whether they
be “fine” or “practical.”

The job of the critic is not to pass judgment on the object as a judge
issues a decision on the basis of precedent, but rather to point out
meaningful features in the object in ways that enhance
observers’ experience of it (AE 302–4). Nor should
aesthetic appraisal of artworks simply consist in applications of
prior aesthetic standards to currently perceived works of art. Recall
that value judgments are instruments that, while they may have been
found useful in past cases, may fail to successfully guide current
conduct. To the extent that a work of art is capable of evoking novel
appreciative experiences, the application of established standards of
aesthetic value to the work may close off such novelty and reduce the
experience of it to a stereotyped, boring recapitulation of past
experiences (if the artwork happens to meet the old standard), or,
worse (if it fails to meet the old standard) provoke a stunted
reaction of offense or disapproval. In such cases the aesthetic
judgment would have failed to do its job, which is to enhance
perception by drawing the observer’s attention to features of
the object, and of relations among the object, its creator, and
observers, that are understood as meaningful and thereby excite
feeling (AE 303). Criticism renders the aesthetic value of an artwork
objective to the extent that it succeeds in evoking common
appreciative experiences among many observers by drawing their
attention to the same features and relations of the artwork (AE
312–3).

On Dewey’s expansive understanding of the aesthetic dimension of
experience, aesthetic value is not possessed by works of art alone,
but can also be possessed by tools and other instruments (EN 283). In
the course of repairing a shelf, one might use a hammer and feel its
heft and balance to be splendidly proportioned for the task, feel the
handle to be molded in a way that perfectly fits one’s hand,
perceive its materials to have been selected with attention to their
fitness for driving nails, and so forth. Such intelligent
appreciation of the hammer in one’s direct experience of it
amounts to an aesthetic valuation of it, insofar as the experience
itself is savored and one’s perceptive faculties are not merely
identifying instrumentally valuable features of the hammer for future
reference but actively engaged in appreciating the aptness of its
design and materials. The repair job, too, can have aesthetic value
to the extent that one experiences it as a unified, smoothly unfolding
process, beginning with an astute assessment of the required
operations, leading to the skilled, fluid, unfrustrated execution of
these operations, and ending with what is appraised and prized as a
successful conclusion--the object experienced as satisfactorily
repaired. When the experience of this process as aptly unifying means
and ends absorbs one’s appreciative attention, either as actor
or as observer, it has aesthetic value.

On this account, the work process itself can have aesthetic value.
Dewey’s aesthetic theory thus provides the basis for
understanding his critique of work as it exists in societies sharply
divided by class. In such societies, the processes of work are
reduced to merely mechanical operations assigned to a servile class,
and divorced from consummatory experiences of the propertied, leisure
class that enjoys the products of others’ labor. Class
division, by divorcing means from ends (production from consumption)
and intelligent planning from physical operations, reduces physical
labor to a tedious, mindless, meaningless mechanical exercise of
habit, which thereby lacks aesthetic value in lacking unity and
intelligent appreciation. The challenge of the modern day is to
consider how work, and human activity generally, can be reformed so
that it has aesthetic value and is thus no longer valued merely
instrumentally (EN 277–8, 307–8).

6. Social Ethics

Consistently with his contextualism, Dewey stressed the social
circumstances in which different moral theories
arose. His Ethics begins, not with a review of rival moral
theories, but with a survey of anthropology and a brief history of the
moral problems and practices of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and
Romans. By locating moral theories in their social contexts, Dewey
exposed their limitations. Theories that make sense in certain
contexts may not make sense in others. For example, Dewey argued that
the failure of ancient Greek teleological theories to grasp the
independence of the right from the good arose from the fact that the
good for individual citizens of Greek city-states was inextricably
wrapped up with participation in civic life and promotion of the good
of the city-state as a whole (TIF 283).

Dewey also stressed the ways abstract philosophical doctrines are
socially embodied, frequently so as to rationalize and reinforce
stultifying and unjust social arrangements. For example, the sharp
dichotomy between purely instrumental and intrinsic goods both
reflects and reinforces an organization of work life that reduces it
to drudgery. Since work is of merely instrumental value, so the
thinking goes, there is no point in trying to make it interesting to
those who do it. The dichotomy also rationalizes oppressive class
divisions. Insofar as the good life is conceived in terms of devotion
to or enjoyment of purely intrinsic, noninstrumental goods (such as
intellectual contemplation and the appreciation of beauty), it is a
life that can be led only by a leisured class, whose members do not
have to spend their time earning a living. This class depends upon a
working class whose function is to provide them with the leisure they
need to pursue the good life. Dewey’s critique of traditional
ways of distinguishing means from ends is thus simultaneously a
critique of class hierarchy (HNC 185–8, TV 235).

Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world
concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal
decisions of the individual (E 314–316). Thus, in contrast with
his voluminous political commentaries, Dewey published very little on
personal “applied ethics.” The rapid social changes that
were taking place in his lifetime required new institutions, as
traditional customs and laws proved themselves unable to cope with
such issues as mass immigration, class conflict, the Great Depression,
the demands of women for greater independence, and the threats to
democracy posed by fascism and communism. As a progressive liberal,
Dewey advocated numerous social reforms such as promoting the
education, employment, and enfranchisement of women, social insurance,
the progressive income tax, and laws protecting the rights of workers
to organize labor unions. However, he stressed the importance of
improving methods of moral inquiry over advocating particular moral
conclusions, given that the latter are always subject to revision in
light of new evidence.

Thus, the main focus of Dewey’s social ethics concerns the
institutional arrangements that influence the capacity of people to
conduct moral inquiry intelligently. Two social domains are critical
for promoting this capacity: schools, and civil society. Both needed
to be reconstructed so as to promote experimental intelligence and
wider sympathies. Dewey wrote numerous works on education, and
established the famous Laboratory School at the University of Chicago
to implement and test his educational theories. He was also a leading
advocate of the comprehensive high school, as opposed to separate
vocational and college preparatory schools. This was to promote the
social integration of different economic classes, a prerequisite to
enlarging their mutual understanding and sympathies. Civil society,
too, needed to be reconstructed along more democratic lines. This
involved not just expanding the franchise, but improving the means of
communication among citizens and between citizens and experts, so that
public opinion could be better informed by the experiences and
problems of citizens from different walks of life, and by scientific
discoveries (PP). Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment
of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the
other members of society (DE 3, 89–94). Unlike dictatorial and
oligarchic societies, democratic ones institutionalize feedback
mechanisms (free speech) for informing officeholders of the
consequences for all of the policies they adopt, and for sanctioning
them (periodic elections) if they do not respond accordingly.

Dewey’s moral epistemology thus leads naturally to his political
philosophy. The reconstruction of moral theory is accomplished by
replacing fixed moral rules and ends with an experimental method that
treats norms for valuing as hypotheses to be tested in practice, in
light of their widest consequences for everyone. To implement this
method requires institutions that facilitate three things: (1) habits
of critical, experimental inquiry; (2) widespread communication of the
consequences of instituting norms, and (3) extensive sympathy, so that
the consequences of norms for everyone are treated seriously in
appraising them and imagining and adopting alternatives. The main
institutions needed to facilitate these things are progressive schools
and a democratic civil society. Experimentalism in ethics leads to a
democratic political philosophy.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Abbreviations of Principal Works Bearing on Dewey’s Ethics

[AE]

Art as Experience, in Later
Works, vol. 10 (1934)

[CD]

“Creative Democracy: The Task before Us,”
in Later Works, vol. 14 (1939).

[DE]

Democracy and Education, in Middle
Works, vol. 9 (1916)

[EN]

Experience and Nature, in Later
Works, vol. 1 (1925)

[HNC]

Human Nature and Conduct, in Middle
Works, vol. 14 (1922)

[HWT]

How We Think, in Middle Works,
vol. 6 (1910).

[E]

Ethics, rev. ed.(John Dewey and James Tufts),
in Later Works, vol. 7 (1932).